Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Terminology is
important to discussion and bandying words around without fully comprehending
their meanings won’t be fruitful. Capitalism is the social system under which
we live. Capitalism is primarily an economic system of competitive capital
accumulation out of the surplus value produced by wage labour. As a system it
must continually accumulate or go into crisis. Consequently, human needs and
the needs of our natural environment take second place to this imperative.
Capitalist investors want to end up with more money than they started out with,
but why? Is it just to live in luxury? That would suggest that they aim of
capitalist production was simply to produce luxuries for the rich.

Capitalism is an ever-expanding economy of capital
accumulation. In other words, most of the profits are capitalised, i.e.
reinvested in production, so that production, the stock of means of production,
and the amount of capital, all tend to increase over time ( in fits and
starts). The economic circuit is thus money - commodities - more money - more
commodities, even more money. This is not the conscious choice of the owners of
the means of production. It is something that is imposed on them as a condition
for not losing their original investment. Competition with other capitalists
forces them to re-nvest as much of their profits as they can afford to in
keeping their means and methods of production up to date. As a result there is
continuous technological innovation. Defenders of capitalism see this as one of
its merits and in the past it was insofar as this has led to the creation of
the basis for a non-capitalist society in which the technologically-developed
means of production can be now—and could have been any time in the last 100
years—consciously used to satisfy people’s wants and needs. Under capitalism
this whole process of capital accumulation and technical innovation is a
disorganised, impersonal process which causes all sorts of
problems—particularly on a world-scale where it is leading to the destruction
of the environment.

The result is waste, pollution, environmental degradation
and unmet needs on a global scale. The ecologist’s dream of a sustainable ‘zero
growth’ within capitalism will always remain just that, a dream. If human
society is to be able to organize its production in an ecologically acceptable
way, then it must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism of capital
accumulation and gear production instead to the direct satisfaction of needs.

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Capitalism differs from previous class societies in that
under it production is not for direct use, not even of the ruling class, but
for sale on a market. To repeat once more, competitive pressures to minimise
costs and maximise sales, profit-seeking and blind economic growth, with all
their destructive effects on the rest of nature, are built-in to capitalism.
These make capitalism inherently environmentally unfriendly. Under capitalism,
there is a very large industry devoted to creating needs. Capitalism requires
consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and drives us to consume up
to, and past, our ability to pay for that consumption. In a system of
capitalist competition, there is a built-in tendency to stimulate demand to a
maximum extent. Firms, for example, need to persuade customers to buy their
products or they go out of business. They would not otherwise spend the vast
amounts they do spend on advertising.

Endless “growth”
(even if in fits and starts) – and the growing consumption of nature-given
materials this involves – is built in to capitalism. However, this is not the
growth of useful things as such but rather the growth of money-values .If, as a
politically active environmentalist or campaigner for social justice, one’s
answer to the question is that they are, indeed, mutually exclusive (that
capitalism, in whichever manifestation, is in its very essence inherently
unsustainable), then one’s only morally consistent response is to devote one’s
political activities to the overthrow of capitalism.

But the picture of capitalism is still not complete. It is
possible to envisage such an economy on paper. Marx called it “simple
reproduction”, but only as a stage in the development of his argument. By
“simple reproduction” he meant that the stock of means of production was simply
reproduced from year to year at its previously existing level; all of the
profits would be used to maintain a privileged, exploiting class in luxury. As
a result the circle keep on repeating itself unchanged.

The problem for many in the Green movement is that they want
to retain the market system in which goods are distributed through sales at a
profit and people’s access to goods depends upon their incomes. The market,
however, can only function with a constant pressure to renew its capacity for
sales and if it fails to do this production breaks down, people are out of
employment and suffer a reduced income. It is a fundamental flaw and an
insoluble contradiction in the Greens argument that they want to retain the
market system, which can only be sustained by continuous sales and continuous
incomes, and at the same time they want a conservation society with reduced
productive activity. These aims are totally incompatible with each other. Also
what many Green thinkers advocate in their various version of a “steady-state”
market economy, is that the surplus would be used not to reinvest in expanding
production, nor in maintaining a privileged class in luxury but in improving
public services while maintaining a sustainable balance with the natural
environment. It’s the old reformist dream of a tamed capitalism.

Marx’s materialist conception of history makes the way
humans are organised to meet their material needs the basis of any society.
Humans meet their material needs by transforming parts of the rest of Nature
into things that are useful to them; this in fact is what production is. So the
basis of any society is its mode of production which, again, is the same thing
as its relationship to the rest of Nature. Humans survive by interfering in the
rest of Nature to change it for their own benefit. A lot of environmental
activists are wrong to see this interference as inherently destructive of
nature. For sure, it might do this, but there is no reason why it has to. That
humans have to interfere in nature is a fact of human existence. But how humans
interfere in Nature, on the other hand, depends on the kind of society they
live in. It is absurd to regard human intervention in Nature as some outside
disturbing force, since humans are precisely that part of Nature which has evolved
that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so.
True, that at the present time, the form human intervention in the rest of
Nature takes is upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that
humans, unlike other life-forms, are capable of changing their behaviour. In
this sense the human species is the brain and voice of Nature ie. Nature become
self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system
which mediates their intervention in Nature.

A change from
capitalism to a community where each contributes to the whole to the best of
his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she
needs. There is in capitalist society a tendency for individuals to seek to
validate their sense of worth through the accumulation of possessions. Humans
behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in. Human
behaviour reflects society. In a society such as capitalism, people’s needs are
not met and people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard because
possession provides some security. People distrust others because the world is
organized in a dog-eat-dog manner. It does not matter how modest one’s real
needs may be or how easily they may be met, capitalism’s “consumer culture”
leads one to want more than one may materially need since what the individual
desires is to enhance his or her status within this hierarchal culture of
consumerism and this is dependent upon acquiring more than others have got. But
since others desire the same thing, the economic inequality inherent in a
system of competitive capitalism must inevitably generate a pervasive sense of
relative deprivation. What this amounts to is a kind of institutionalised envy
and that will be unsustainable as more peoples are drawn into alienated
capitalism. The notion of status based upon the conspicuous consumption of
wealth would be devoid of meaning in socialism because individuals would stand
in equal relation to the means of production and have free access to the goods
and services.

Humans are capable of integrating themselves into a stable
ecosystem. and there is nothing whatsoever that prevents this being possible
today on the basis of industrial technology and methods of production, all the
more so, that renewable energies exist (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and
whatever ) but, for the capitalists, these are a “cost” which penalises them in
face of international competition. No agreement to limit the activities of the
multinationals in their relentless quest for profits is possible. Measures in
favour of the environment come up against the interests of enterprises and
their shareholders because by increasing costs they decrease profits. No State
is going to implement legislation which would penalise the competitiveness of
its national enterprises in the face of foreign competition. States only take
into account environmental questions if they can find an agreement at
international level which will disadvantage none of them. But that’s the
problem, isn’t it? Competition for the appropriation of world profits is one of
the bases of the present system. So it is not “Humans” but the capitalist
economic system itself which is responsible for ecological problems. The
capitalist class and their representatives they themselves are subject to the
laws of profit and competition.

Socialists are seeking ultimately to establish a
“steady-state economy” or “zero-growth” society which corresponds to what Marx
called “simple reproduction” – a situation where human needs were in balance
with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have
decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making
processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs
of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating
this continuously from production period to production period. Production would
not be ever-increasing but would be stabilized at the level required to satisfy
needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the
products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of
production used up in producing these consumer goods. The point about such a
situation is that there will no longer be any imperative need to develop
productivity, i.e. to cut costs in the sense of using less resources; nor will
there be the blind pressure to do so that is exerted under capitalism through
the market.

It will also create a ecologically benign relationship with
nature. In socialism we would not be bound to use the most labour efficient
methods of production. We would be free to select our methods in accordance
with a wide range of socially desirable criteria, in particular the vital need
to protect the environment. What it means is that we should construct
permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We
would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer
goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and
made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would
get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they
can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory
levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total
social production could even be reduced. This will be the opposite of to-day’s
capitalist system’s cheap, shoddy, “throw-away” goods and built-in
obsolescence, which results in a massive loss and destruction of resources.

In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change
relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system
of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under
conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period,
would enable the local distribution committee to estimate what the need for
food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period.
Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants,
builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as
street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution
committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the
bodies charged with coordinating supplies to local communities.

We can set out a possible way of achieving an eventual zero
growth steady state society operating in a stable and ecologically benign way.
This could be achieved in three main phases.

1) there would have to be emergency action to relieve the
worst problems of food shortages, health care and housing which affect billions
of people throughout the world.

2) longer term action to construct means of production and infrastructures
such as transport systems for the supply of permanent housing and durable
consumption goods. These could be designed in line with conservation
principles, which means they would be made to last for a long time, using
materials that where possible could be re-cycled and would require minimum
maintenance.

3) with these objectives achieved there could be an eventual
fall in production, and society could move into a stable mode. This would
achieve a rhythm of daily production in line with daily needs with no
significant growth. On this basis, the world community could reconcile two
great needs, the need to live in material well-being whilst looking after the
planet

Marx was fond of quoting the 17th century writer Sir William
Petty’s remark that labour is the father and nature the mother of wealth.

What would a society have to be like to be environmentally
sustainable? Basically, according to Jonathon Porritt, well-known environmental
writer this would be a society whose methods of providing for the needs of its
members did not use up non-renewable resources quicker than renewable
substitutes for them could be found; did not use up renewal resources quicker
than nature could reproduce them; and did not release waste into nature quicker
than the environment’s ability to absorb it. If these practices are abided by,
then the relationship and interactions between human society and the rest of
nature would be able to continue on a long-term basis – would be able to be
“sustained” – without harming or degrading the natural environment on which
humans depend.

We should construct permanent, durable means of production
which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable
equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long
time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if
necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of
materials and once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over
and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of
consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social
production could even be reduced. You achieve this “steady state” and you don’t
go on expanding production. This would be the opposite of cheap, shoddy,
“throw-away” goods and built-in obsolescence, which results in a massive loss
and destruction of resources. This is something that socialism could do.

Socialists contend that these practices could be
systematically applied only within the context of the Earth’s natural and
industrial resources being the common heritage of all humanity under democratic
control. In other words, we place ourselves unambiguously in the camp of those
who argue that capitalism and a sustainable relationship with the rest of
nature are not compatible. The excessive consumption of both renewal and
non-renewable resources and the release of waste that nature can’t absorb that
currently go on are not just accidental but an inevitable result of capitalism’s
very nature.

This of course is not how capitalism operates. It is not a
“steady state economy”. On the contrary, it is an ever-expanding economy of
capital accumulation. In other words, most of the profits are capitalised, i.e.
reinvested in production, so that production, the stock of means of production,
and the amount of capital, all tend to increase over time (not in a smooth
straight line, but only in fits and starts). The economic circuit is thus
money-commodities-more money-more commodities, even more money. This is not the
conscious choice of the owners of the means of production. It is something that
is imposed on them as a condition for not losing their original investment.
Competition with other capitalists forces them to reinvest as much of their
profits as they can afford to in keeping their means and methods of production
up to date. As a result there is continuous technological innovation. Defenders
of capitalism see this as one of its merits and in the past it was insofar as
this has led to the creation of the basis for a non-capitalist society in which
the technologically-developed means of production can be now—and could have
been any time in the last 100 years—consciously used to satisfy people’s wants
and needs. Under capitalism this whole process of capital accumulation and
technical innovation is a disorganised, impersonal process which causes all
sorts of problems—particularly on a world-scale where it is leading to the
destruction of the environment.

The fact is that for several decades the world’s capacity to
produce food has far exceeded the entire human population’s need for
nourishment has been well known and documented. The problem is to do with the
whole basis of capitalis m. If you’ve got no money, or not enough money, you’re
not part of the market. Food and farming policy has very little to do with
meeting human needs, guaranteeing food security, providing high and consistent
levels of nutrition and food safety. It’s all about profit: squeezing the
maximum financial yield out of every link in the food chain to benefit a tiny
number. This is no defence of the financial speculators but reminding ourselves
that it is the system of buying and selling that results in food shortages. The
poor simply do not constitute a market — there is no profit to be made out of
selling food to the destitute, or from growing food for them. If the one dollar
a day will not stretch to buying food, then too bad. Countries supposedly in
the grip of famine hardly ever have an absolute food shortage, it’s just that
the food available is sold to those who can afford to buy it or exported for
consumption elsewhere. The answer to the problems that global capitalism has
engendered is not another policy that would still leave intact the basic
structures and mechanisms of capitalism. Capitalism operates according to the
rules of “no profit, no production” and “can’t pay, can’t have” and, as the
world market system, is what is responsible for the desperate plight of most of
the world’s population. Before anything lasting and constructive can be done
about this, capitalism has to go. It is something much more far-reaching that
is required, a rapid and radical change in the basis of world society that will
make the Earth’s resources the common heritage of all humanity. Too many try to
control capitalism for the benefit of humanity, to humanise it. Like all
reformers, they limit themselves to attacking features which they do not like
and fail to realise that those features are integral to capitalism. What they
are for is a more regulated capitalism. They merely want governments to
intervene to try to control capitalism, to suppress its worst excesses.

Whether it is called “the market economy”, “free enterprise”
or any other euphemism, the social system under which we live is capitalism. As
a system it must continually accumulate or go into crisis. Consequently, human
needs and the needs of our natural environment take second place to this
imperative. The result is waste, pollution, environmental degradation and unmet
needs on a global scale. The ecologist’s dream of a sustainable ‘zero growth’
within capitalism will always remain just that, a dream.If human society is to
be able to organize its production in an ecologically acceptable way, then it
must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism of capital accumulation and gear
production instead to the direct satisfaction of needs. Many Greens and
ecologists have talked about “zero-growth” and a “steady-state” society and
this is something we should be aiming at.

The problem for the ecologists is that they want this, but
they also want to retain the market system in which goods are distributed
through sales at a profit and people’s access to goods depends upon their
incomes. The market, however, can only function with a constant pressure to
renew its capacity for sales; and if it fails to do this production breaks
down, people are out of employment and suffer a reduced income. It is a
fundamental flaw and an insoluble contradiction in the Greens argument that
they want to retain the market system, which can only be sustained by
continuous sales and continuous incomes, and at the same time they want a
conservation society with reduced productive activity. These aims are totally
incompatible with each other. Also what many Green thinkers advocate in their
version of a “steady-state” market economy, is that the surplus would be used
not to reinvest in expanding production, nor in maintaining a privileged class
in luxury but in improving public services while maintaining a sustainable
balance with the natural environment. It’s the old reformist dream of a tamed
capitalism, minus the controlled expansion of the means of production an
earlier generation of reformists used to envisage.

Socialists start from a concern for the suffering of humans
and look for a solution to this. This makes them “anthropocentric” as opposed
to the “ecocentrism” – Nature first – of many ecologists and Greens. The
plunder and destruction of Nature is rejected as not being in the interests of
the human species, not because the interests of Nature come first. Nor is it
true that humans as such are a pollutant. It is in identifying the causes of
pollution and environmental degradation that Greens can in his view learn most
from Marx. Present-day society, capitalism, which exists all over the globe is
a class-divided society where the means of production are owned and controlled
by a tiny minority of the population only. Capitalism differs from previous
class societies in that under it production is not for direct use, not even of
the ruling class, but for sale on a market. To repeat once more, competitive
pressures to minimise costs and maximise sales, profit-seeking and blind
economic growth, with all their destructive effects on the rest of nature, are
built-in to capitalism. These make capitalism inherently environmentally
unfriendly.

Very few environmentalists reject capitalism. Most Greens
are in favour of some form of capitalism, generally small-scale capitalism
involving small firms serving local markets and if they desire to be seen as
progressive they call for “co-operatives”. An underlying philosophy that “small
is beautiful” and a philosophy that leads to mistakenly blaming large-scale
industry and modern technology as such for causing pollution and not the
capitalist system per se.

Murray Bookchin who
has also exposed the “anti-humanism” of some Green activists argues that human
beings are both a part and a product of nature and humans have a unique
significance in nature since they are the only life-form capable of reflective
thought and so of conscious intervention to change the environment. It is
absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force,
since humans are precisely that part of nature which has evolved that consciously
intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so. True, that at the
present time, the form human intervention in the rest of Nature takes is
upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that humans, unlike
other life-forms, are capable of changing their behaviour.In this sense the
human species is the brain and voice of Nature ie. Nature become
self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system
which mediates their intervention in nature. A change from capitalism to a
community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability
and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs. Bookchin too is
critical of those with the highly misleading notion that society can live with
a market economy that is ‘green’, ‘ecological’, or ‘moral’, under conditions of
wage labour, exchange, competition and the like. The framework within which
humans can regulate their relationship with the rest of nature in an
ecologically acceptable way has to be a society based on the common ownership
and democratic control of productive resources, freed from the tyranny of the
economic laws that operate wherever there is production for sale on a market

“Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than
a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’
capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the
system as a system of endless growth. ” – Murray Bookchin

One of the ways in which Porritt suggests that governments
could achieve a “a market-based model of sustainable capitalism” would be to
force the competing enterprises to treat natural resources as if they were
capital, subject to depreciation which had to be accounted for in monetary
terms. He talks of “natural capital”, treating Nature as an economic category
with a price-tag. Porritt complains that “we show nothing but contempt for the
contribution from nature, valuing it at zero as some kind of free gift or
subsidy” and that, as a result, “today’s dominant paradigm of capitalism” leads
to the plundering of non-renewable resources (such as oil and minerals) and the
over-harvesting of renewable ones (such as fish and forests).

This is true but his proposed solution – to take into
account the non-renewed consumption of natural material as a negative amount
when calculating GDP, as an incentive to cut back on it as a way of avoiding a
reduction in GDP leaves the real world unchanged.

In the real world, which GDP attempts to measure, the
competing enterprises would still only take into account as a cost what they
had to pay for. As it costs no labour to produce natural materials (only to
extract or harvest them, not to create them), whether or not they are renewed
doesn’t enter into the calculation. If enterprises were forced to artificially
take into account using up non-renewed natural resources in their business
accounts, that would distort the calculation of the rate of profit which is the
key economic indicator for capitalism. There is no way round this under
capitalism, which simply cannot be remodelled or reformed on this point.

Porritt does concede that he could be wrong about capitalism
and environmental sustainability and how bad it would be “to be committed to a
reform agenda if the system one sought to reform was inherently incapable of
accommodating the necessary changes in the first place”. This is precisely the
case I have been trying to present and if being so his own conclusion must stand:

“If, as a politically active environmentalist or campaigner
for social justice, one’s answer to the question is that they are, indeed,
mutually exclusive (that capitalism, in whichever manifestation, is in its very
essence inherently unsustainable), then one’s only morally consistent response
is to devote one’s political activities to the overthrow of capitalism”.

[quotes from Porritt's Capitalism As if the World Matters]

Instead ‘The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide
Ecosocialist Movement’, by Derek Wall should be recommended reading. On the question of the “commons” Wall is much more on the right track when he
says the key to successful eco-socialism lies in the concept of “the commons”(an
everyday example of “the commons” is libraries, where items are borrowed and
returned as the need arises.) The concept can be applied to whole economies.

“The commons overcomes many of the problems with traditional
state socialism because it tends to be flexible and decentralised”, says Wall.
“It has an inbuilt ecological principle based on the concept of usufruct, that
is, access to a resource is granted only if the resource is left in as good a
form as it was when first found. By extending this concept of usufruct, we can
provide the basis of an ecological economy. By providing access, the commons enables
prosperity without growth; if we have access to the resources we need, we can
reduce wasteful duplication.”

Wall identifies the same weakness as perhaps the author of
the article does when he states that bringing about that change will require
intense political struggle but he also cautions about the dangers of reformism
– “the political system has been better at transforming radicals than radicals
have been at changing the political system”. Wall says in Western societies,
Greens have abandoned their principles once in power and often ignore the
working class as agents of change.

He insists activists must know economics. That requires a
return not to Trotsky but to Marx and Engels. And again he adds the caveat.
“There will never be a convincing blueprint for survival and socialism, of
whatever shade, should not be constructed by a committee.”

The change required must be based on the socialist
principles of common ownership and production solely for needs, and also the
environmental principles of conserving the wealth of the planet. It is the
waste of human and other resources used in the market system which adds to the
problem and stands in the way of their solution. Some may claim that the proper
use of market forces will solve the problem, but as time goes on the emerging
and mounting facts of what is happening serve only to contradict those voices.

It is not simply about using a green” version of Marx but
developing a system of production that is sustainable. Socialists seek a steady
state, zero-growth world.

Capitalism cannot create such a society. Henry Waxman
explained that “We found a pattern. Every time they had a decision to make they
decided to cut corners; to do things faster than they otherwise should have
been done; to do it less expensively and the consequence of this, as one
independent expert told us, was horribly negligent…Time after time, it appears
that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company
time or expense…BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the
liner option would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer…BP appears
to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger
of a catastrophic well failure.”

Capitalism, with its emphasis on profit and short-term
considerations, provides fertile ground for accidents and disasters of various
kinds. It also means that any accidents which do happen are likely to be more
serious and harmful than would otherwise be the case. Cutting corners and
ignoring safety matters is part and parcel of a profit-oriented system.
Governmental regulation can affect the level of accidents, but the desire for
profits favours the cutting of corners, so the possibility always remain.
Capitalists must remain flexible enough to take risks that may brings greater
rewards in the interest of profit. This competitive aspect of capitalism
nullifies any real prospect of solving the problem through the law. Deepwater
Horizon was just “an unfortunate accident” arising from the normal functioning
of the system. And although one might think that it would therefore be natural
to question and challenge a system that accepts this lunacy as “an unfortunate
accident”, nothing could be further from the minds of the media.

The Possibilists regarded socialism as a progressive social
process rather than an ‘all-at-once’ end. Those who regarded capitalism and
socialism as mutually exclusive systems and refused to budge from the
revolutionary position of what has become known as ‘the maximum programme’ were
labelled as Impossibilists.